Who are the unhappiest people, asks Spa — the married, the single or the divorced?
The negative question is characteristic of this chronically depressed magazine, which could as easily have asked who are the happiest. Or perhaps not. Japan, with so much going for it, is not a happy country.
What does it have going for it? It is a democracy, it is at peace, it is the world's third-largest economy, and it enjoys to the full the emblematic happiness of our time — a level of technological empowerment that the less fortunate past had to conjure up in fantasies of genies, wizards, magic rings, magic mirrors and such-like supernatural extravagances.